The human eye and brain, or human visual system (HVS), helps people prosper in a competitive race for survival. Use of the HVS as a tool for analytical purposes such as medical or industrial radiography, is a fairly recent use of the HVS.
Visual observation of lightness or darkness (“grayscale”) of items in an image or scene is a prominent method to identify items in the image, which items can be important, for example, to medical diagnosis and treatment, or industrial quality control, or other image-critical decision making processes. Other fields using observation of grayscale values include forensic, remote surveillance and geospatial, astronomy, geotechnical exploration, and others. These observation processes provide an important improvement to our overall health, safety, and welfare.
HVS perception of changes in grayscale tonal values (and other intensity values) is variable, affected by multiple factors. “Just noticeable difference—JND” identifies HVS ability to distinguish minor differences of grayscale intensity for side-by-side samples, and is also known as the Weber Ratio. A simple thought experiment exemplifies the variability of HVS perception, in this case, the variation of JND with overall luminance level. Consider sunrise; as dawn approaches, the pitch blackness reveals more detail of the surrounding scene to the HVS (discriminate more shades of gray) as the sun increases the scene illumination. This occurs even while adaptive discrimination of HVS (night vision) has adequate time to adjust our perception skills to the low illumination level at night. DICOM Part 14 to portray up to 1000 JND grayshades. The HVS may be able to perceive as many as 1,000 tonal grayshades under properly controlled observation conditions, but as a topographic surface, the perception task is relieved of this need for sophisticated methods.
LumenIQ, Inc. (“Lumen”) has numerous patents and published patent applications that discuss methods, systems, etc., of using 3D visualization to improve a person's ability to see small differences in an image, such as small differences in the lightness or darkness (grayscale data) of a particular spot in a digital image. U.S. Pat. No. 6,445,820; U.S. Pat. No. 6,654,490; U.S. 20020114508; WO 02/17232; 20020176619; 20040096098; 20040109608. Generally, these methods and systems display grayscale (or other desired intensity, etc.) data of a 2D digital image as a 3D topographic map: The relative darkness and lightness of the spots (pixels) in the image are determined, then the darker areas are shown as “mountains,” while lighter areas are shown as “valleys” (or vice-versa). In other words, at each pixel point in an image, grayscale values are measured, projected as a surface height (or z axis), and connected through image processing techniques. FIGS. 1A and 1B show examples of this, where the relative darkness of the ink of two handwriting samples are shown in 3d with the darker areas shown as higher “mountains.”
This helps the HVS to overcome its inherent weakness at discerning subtle differences in image intensity patterns in a 2D image. If desired, the image can then be identified, rotated, flipped, tilted, etc. Such images can be referred to as magnitude enhancement analysis images, although the kinematic (motion) aspect need only be present when desired (in which case the created representations are not truly kinematic images). These techniques can be used with any desired image, such as handwriting samples, fingerprints, DNA patterns (“smears”), medical images such as MRIs, x-rays, industrial images, satellite images, etc.
There has gone unmet a need for improved systems and methods, etc., for interpreting and/or automating the analysis of images such as medical images. The present systems and methods provide these or other advantages.